I had the good fortune of having a family member who’d been brought by ambulance and diagnosed with an illness rarely seen in America anymore. When I told the nurse at the front desk his name (she was behind Plexiglas so I had to shout) I was sent up to Ledric’s room immediately. In the elevator I wondered how much a private room cost. I hoped they had him bunking with other people.
He might as well have had a Barcalounger near his bed for the excess space they’d given. How about a wide-screen television with a host of private movies and a masseur on call, since we’re spending Anthony’s money? I would’ve felt better, maybe nonchalant, if I believed that Ledric had even collected loose change in a jar. The penniless creep. He couldn’t have asked for the room, too weak to say it, so some clerk had assigned this manse.
I left when the doctors finally came. They asked me to leave. There were two of them. When I returned in twenty minutes they’d written down Ledric’s many symptoms but had done nothing to repair his health.
— What are you going to do for him?
The physicians nodded, but without looking up from their papers. They didn’t seem wealthy, either one. For instance, their watches were cheap. Digital faces with plastic bands. One wore black while the flashy one’s was orange.
— It’s not botulism, said the first one. He told me like he was solving an illusionist’s trick.
The second one agreed and laughed to prove it. — It is not botulism.
— But the Russian doctor was so sure, I said.
The first put his hand up. — There’s a good chance your friend over there spent too long in a gulag.
— You should take his diagnosis with a tranquilizer.
— We’ll probably end up giving Mr. Mayo a purgative, that’s all.
— Oh that’s good, I said.
— He’ll get the runs, the doctor with an orange watch clarified. He pointed at things a lot just to show that gaudy colorful band. We’re going to let Mr. Mayo sleep a while and check on him tomorrow.
— But he’s not asleep. I don’t even think he’s breathing, I said.
— He’s breathing under his own power.
— The next time you want to get well, come to us. I’ll bet this Russian would amputate your foot if you came in with whooping cough. They laughed at the doctor and it seemed, in his absence, at me.
I thanked them anyway as they left. Sitting next to Ledric in a chair I kicked my feet. Hospitals are quiet when you need them to be.
I couldn’t sleep, but I was exhausted. I took off my shoes, so that helped. Ledric was as big as the bed. The nurses had dropped the metal guards from the sides of the mattress because he wouldn’t have fit on it otherwise.
I walked around the room in my socks to see him from all angles. Even crouching at the foot of the bed, staring up from his feet to the rise of his belly. I pulled the sheets above his ankles while I was down there just to see those five-pound potatoes he called feet.
It was like I had an audience with my own body; a chance to see how I’d look laid out on a bed. Except for his face we were enough alike. I walked to the window, blocking daylight, and Ledric’s figure worried me. I don’t mean his weight; the lonesomeness. Other than myself no one else was going to visit.
When I sat next to him again, heard his fuzzy breathing, I forgot sympathy and only remembered the burden. How had he become my responsibility? Nabisase and Grandma expected me at home. Was this how my mother felt before we went to Virginia?
To pass the next hour, since Ledric wasn’t going to tell any jokes, I tore off the cover of the hospital phone book and wrote a few more quick movie entries. Night of the Hatchet, Bet They Die, Easily Eaten. Why did the one-eyed drifter take his hatchet to the people of Tarpenny, Florida? In a surprise twist, they were a town of warlocks and witches and the drifter was a righteous man.
I looked at the words and felt guilty because I wasn’t going to give Ishkabibble a film. Only summaries of them. Not a movie, just letters.
After an hour and a half I left the room to call Grandma and yelled when I heard that Nabisase had skipped school a second day. They were happy to know Ledric was safe.
At home we ate dinner in the living room. We watched television awhile, sitting on the same sectional couch watching the same show, it was actually pleasant enough.
The nice thing about working as a house cleaner is that there’s some room allowed for personal crisis. The Third World isn’t running out of reserves to fill the posts.
Between a short day shift at Sparkle then another night at Clean Up I went to visit Ledric on November 15th. He didn’t seem to have moved since I’d left the afternoon before. It was a good sign, though, that he was still breathing without equipment. I guess that was a good sign.
While I waited I touched his hand. I picked lint out of his hair. There was even some on his eyebrows. What a dummy. I hoped he was alright.
The general practitioners returned after I’d waited an hour, both smiling, holding Ledric’s many medical forms. I thought they were going to discharge him and these were the bills.
Instead each guy tried to outkind the other. If one shook my hand, the other put his hand on my shoulder. The first offered me a stick of gum and the second gave me a whole pack. I thought they were preparing me for an outrageous invoice.
— We looked at the results and had a neurologist in to see Mr. Mayo. We feel very confident now in our opinion that Mr. Mayo has contracted botulism.
From his bed Ledric raised a pointed finger. He struggled to direct that mini-carrot at me. If he could speak, Ledric would be gloating: No hospitals I said. He would have, but couldn’t because the physicians pulled his arm back down then pulled the covers over his belly, right up to his sweaty neck. They snugly tucked him in and grinned.
27
A problem with dogs is that they can’t be reasonable. I don’t mean just the wild ones.
When I came back from the hospital on Wednesday afternoon my reserves were tapped; a two-day snooze was in order. I wanted to try and get one, at least.
Near my home I stopped at the old white house on the corner to rest against its low fence. My vision was spotty, and I realized that I hadn’t eaten since plucking Ledric from the room he rented.
You did that, I crowed to myself. You saved the boy’s life.
But forget five minutes of pride because Candan’s red Doberman chased me half a block home. It had been out wandering, I suppose.
It could have caught up. It should have. Instead it paced me, staying about an eighth of an inch behind. Not snapping its jaws so much as clicking its teeth. I got so confused that I tripped. When I fell, just two houses from my own, the red Doberman stopped and waited for me to stand.
Soon as I did it sparked again; snarling; going on until I was inside my yard with the gate closed.
The dog then ran past my place, past Candan’s to the one-family home of Henry and Althea Blankets. Older folks with a fat German Shepherd. The red Doberman stopped there to bark hysterically at their yard until the German Shepherd inside the compound answered.
After the German Shepherd started the red Doberman ran to the next house and did the same thing until an Irish Setter completed the quorum.
28
As I came in the house my sister apologized. — Not another day, she said, before I could.
— You’ll go back to school tomorrow, I told her. Did you see those dogs outside?